


Misery Redux

by Cyphomandra



Category: Misery - Stephen King, Misery Chastain Series - Paul Sheldon
Genre: Character Death, Dark Tower References, Fix-It of Sorts, Metafiction, Multi, Non-Consensual Drug Use, Stealth Crossover, child harm
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-09-14
Updated: 2020-09-14
Packaged: 2021-03-06 17:54:44
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 6,527
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26452939
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Cyphomandra/pseuds/Cyphomandra
Summary: Some characters are harder to kill.
Comments: 5
Kudos: 12
Collections: King of Exchanges 2020





	Misery Redux

**Author's Note:**

  * For [scioscribe](https://archiveofourown.org/users/scioscribe/gifts).



> Thanks to my incredible betas. I have brought forward the Reform Act by a couple of years.

_17th November, 1871_

Heavy iron gates clanked shut. Ian raised his head, unable to entirely suppress the surge of hope. Geoffrey was thanking the asylum porter through the bars and pressing a coin into the man’s palm. Alone, Ian thought, knowing it was a bad sign, but maybe - Geoffrey glanced sideways towards where Ian stood beside the waiting coach.

Ian didn’t need the quick shake of Geoffrey’s head to know it was another dead end. He’d seen everything he needed in his oldest friend’s pained glance.

He asked anyway. “You checked everyone.”

Geoffrey sat down on the coach seat with a thump. He looked exhausted, and well he might, given the day’s far-ranging travel and their fruitless quest. “Every last one. Staff as well, from a very superior matron to the youngest skivvy.”

Ian rapped on the roof, and the coach swayed as the horses broke into a trot. The sun was almost touching the horizon, and the November fog sent cautious tendrils across the asylum’s grounds. The mist should have softened the stone walls; instead, they only seemed more foreboding.

Geoffrey slumped back against his seat. “That’s the last one in Devon.” 

“I’ll search the whole of the British Isles if I have to,” Ian snarled, finding in anger some refuge from despair.

“I know. But not tonight.” Geoffrey put one hand out to grip Ian's forearm.

Another night without his darling and his son, Ian thought. Another night not knowing where they were, or what condition they were in, if they were cold or hurt or no longer together…

“I know,” Geoffrey said again. His fingers tightened, giving Ian something to cling on to. “We will find them.”

He couldn’t meet his old friend’s gaze. “It’s my fault,” he said, the words ripping their way out of him. “I sent her away.”

Geoffrey’s grip didn’t lessen. “You thought it was for the best.”

Ian shook his head. Geoffrey could say that, but he knew better. He didn’t deserve Misery, or his son, or Geoffrey for that matter. He pulled his arm free.

The coach rattled on into the night.

***

_One month earlier_

Misery expected the nightmares, although she didn’t welcome them. Over and over she woke in the small hours, clawing at the bedclothes, convinced she was back in the thick dark of her coffin and held down by the smothering weight of dirt. Eventually Ian gave orders to the servants to keep the fires blazing overnight, so Misery could sleep in only the silk of her nightgown and the dreams eased. 

Then daylight became treacherous. The first hallucination came on a day when Misery had taken her young son out into the garden, to lie on a blanket kick his feet at an eggshell blue autumn sky. Mrs. Ramage looked out the kitchen window, up to her wrists in dishwater, and muttered about storms coming, but for now it was warm, almost hot, and the faint breeze barely stirred the heads of the few late roses. Misery reached for one, thinking to brush the extravagant crimson petals against Thomas’ paler (but still rosy) cheeks, and shrieked.

Thomas burst into tears. Ian was there in seconds, still in his shirt-sleeves, and grabbed at Misery. 

“A bee?” He scanned her hands and arms anxiously. He’d ripped out the lavender and borage from the kitchen garden, and would have dug over all the flower beds but Misery had pleaded for them. (“Hezekiah said I would be all right,” she’d pointed out, and Ian, less convinced, had finally agreed.) “Oh my darling - “

“Not a bee.” Misery opened her fist, unable to find the words.

She’d squeezed the rosebud tight in her fright. Ian picked the crumpled mass of petals off her palm and poked at them. Crimson teardrops fell one by one onto the neatly kept lawn. A few yellow-tipped stamens. Nothing else.

_(an eye in the rose, the iris a stormy grey, the pupil small, darting from side to side, until it suddenly fixed on her and the tiny black circle grew in horrid delight)_

Misery blinked. “Nothing. I thought I saw something.” She forced a smile. “An earwig.”

She bent, belatedly, to retrieve Thomas, and tucked his head under her chin, humming a lullaby.

Ian was still wild-eyed. “You’re sure?” He put a hand on her shoulder.

Misery nodded. Dear, dear Ian. He’d been through so much for her. Her mind turned back to their early days together, when the Viscount Levrell had schemed to have her declared insane and thrown into Bedlam amongst lunatics… She shivered.

“Where’s his nurse? You shouldn’t be out here alone.” Ian turned back towards the house. Thomas’ nurse was already coming out, wiping her hands on her apron.

“You should lie down for a while.” Ian tugged at Misery. Thomas shifted against her, making a contented clucking noise.

A trick of the light. Nothing more. She was perfectly well, if perhaps a little tired. She opened her arms for Thomas’ nurse to take him, and followed them back inside.

When she wandered down the hallway, Thomas, his belly full of milk, was being rocked to sleep in the carved wooden cradle that had soothed untold generations of tiny Carmichaels. Misery paused in the doorway of the nursery as the rocking slowed to a stop. The nurse adjusted the veil that hung over the cradle and padded, soft-footed, to the door. Misery stepped back to let her shut it behind her.

“You could do with a nap, too, ma’am. You look proper pulled-down.”

Misery appreciated the woman’s concern. “Perhaps one of your teas?” she suggested. Chief among the nurse’s few possessions was a thick herbal, stuffed full of receipts for various teas and salves to cure any and all ills; she had begun bringing them to Misery when she was first troubled with nightmares, and perhaps the bitter concoctions had done some good. Surely this was only another sort of nightmare, nothing more. 

For a brief second the woman’s face bulged out like she were a paper cut-out someone had poked from behind with a finger. Then it snapped back. Nothing more, Misery told herself, and pulled her lips into a smile.

“I’ll make you a nice cup,” Nurse Wilkes promised.

***

_17th November, 1871_

As the carriage bumped its way down Broze Hill and into the last mile before Little Dunthorpe, Ian fell into an exhausted and restless sleep. The silvery moonlight picked out the strain on his face. Geoffrey, sitting opposite, felt helpless to do anything to relieve it.

The habit of concealing his feelings was too longstanding to change now. He’d loved Ian for years, since they were youths together (Ian always the more daring, Geoffrey the cautious but stubborn follower), teetering on that keen edge between affection and fear. At one moment he was sure that Ian must know and was only waiting for Geoffrey himself to act; at the other he was equally certain he was deluding himself, and Ian would be at best politely negative and at worse repelled. Then - was it ten years ago now? - they’d ended up in a seedy alley by the Liverpool docks, about to be robbed or beaten by a group of men who’d taken distinct objection to their presence, when a bright-eyed, brown-haired girl had whirled in between them, seizing Ian’s arm, hissing, “Tell them you’re my husband,” and in the same breath, louder, “There you are! I’ve been waiting for you.” Her smile was dazzling.

He’d given Ian up when he’d shoved him towards the girl. And then, because his heart hadn’t learned anything from its first prolonged bout of unrequited passion, he’d fallen for Misery. And lost her, over and over, each loss a raw and bleeding hole.

The noise of the carriage wheels altered in pitch, and from the window Geoffrey could see the neat outline of the dower cottage besides the gatehouse. Ahead, waiting at the end of the drive, stood the manor, bereft of its mistress and heir. 

Someone had left a light burning in the empty nursery. Mrs. Ramage, probably, who was closer in sympathy to her superstitious Celtic ancestors than she would ever admit to the vicar. If Geoffrey wished he could do the same, set the cradle rocking in that too-quiet room to call Misery’s child back -

_(our child)_

he didn’t want to admit it either, even to himself. 

It wasn’t a sudden lightning bolt of inspiration. Instead, as Geoffrey reached forward to gently shake Ian awake, regretting the inevitable dawn of loss in Ian’s sleepy gaze, he saw all the pieces of their shattered lives in a new light, as if someone had tipped them like a kaleidoscope.

“We’ve been looking for Misery,” he said. “I think we should look for Thomas’ nurse.”

*** 

_One week earlier_

Denying the hallucinations didn’t help. Misery was constantly on edge, starting at any unexpected sounds or movements. She avoided mirrors after too many incidents where her reflection had warped as she watched, or, worse, glanced back fearfully over its shoulder as if being pursued. She couldn’t eat, but sipped the teas both Mrs. Ramage and Nurse Wilkes pressed on her - the first favoured strong black tea, with so much sugar that it was almost syrup, while the nurse’s herbal brews were refreshingly astringent but left her mouth with a metallic tang that made food seem even less palatable.

Geoffrey sought out a doctor from London, not content with any one local (“Not after that fool Shinebone,” she’d overheard him say to Ian, and felt once again that crushing earth), and eventually produced a cheerful rotund Welshman with sharp eyes, who’d examined Misery from top to toe in her bedroom, insisting Ian wait below.

“Any trouble with your husband? Beats you? Mocks or belittles you?”

Misery adamantly denied it. She considered the truth, but the memory of Bedlam still haunted her. Hesitantly, she said she’d had trouble sleeping, and little appetite.

“Your son’s what, not quite a year?”

Misery nodded.

“Women are often low after childbearing.” He shot her a keen glance. “Sometimes they hear voices. Think their children are changelings or some such.”

None of her hallucinations had affected Thomas. And she wasn’t hearing voices. But if it was the result of childbearing, surely she would be over it soon? 

“Nothing like that,” she said.

The doctor studied her again for a brief moment.

“There’s a place I know along the coast aways. A rest home for distressed gentlewomen. Fresh air and good food. A few weeks should set you right.”

_(chains dragging at her wrists, and mocking cold laughter echoing from the adjacent cell)_

Misery shook her head.

The doctor prescribed yet another tea - beef, this time, to be made up fresh each morning from the butcher’s choicest cuts - and told her to rest. Neither helped. The hallucinations harried her constantly, afflicting more of her senses than just sight, until she was no longer quite sure what was real. Ian and Geoffrey, and Thomas — these constants remained. Everything else grew uncertain.

“Darling.” Ian found her weeping in the study over the wreck of her embroidery. She’d ripped the sampler in half and flung it aside when beads of thick dark blood welled up through each spot where she’d inserted her needle. “Please tell me what’s wrong.” He lifted her hands in his, the warmth a faint comfort. “Or Geoffrey, if you’d rather.”

Her wedding ring, the engraved gold set with the largest of the Carmichael garnets, hung loose on her finger. _Forever_ , he’d promised, and she’d agreed. _For always._

Geoffrey leaned against the doorframe, as if summoned by his name. His shirt front and jacket were impeccable as always, but his tie was askew, one collar stud unfastened.

Why couldn’t she tell them? 

In the depths of Bedlam she’d known herself sane. She couldn’t say the same now. Yet did she really believe they would reject her?

She swallowed. ‘I see things,” she said. Ian’s fingers tightened on hers. “It’s - I feel something, someone’s trying to find me. Eyes watching me, hands reaching out, and things that should be solid move as if they’re curtains with someone behind them.” 

She glanced between the men. “I smell burning. I’ve asked the maids dozens of times if an ember jumped out of the fire, or if a candle’s caught a sheet of paper. And the sound. It’s loud, but no-one else hears it.”

Geoffrey straightened. “A voice?”

Misery shook her head. “No. Mechanical.” A deep burr that shook her very bones. “Like the bandsaw Mr Tilton uses at the lumber mill.”

Ian’s fingers threaded through hers. “Can you hear it now?”

Thinking about it brought her a distant whine, almost imperceptible. The more she listened the louder it grew.

“It’s here.” 

She couldn’t help asking. “Do you hear it?” 

The very walls were vibrating. Ian’s lips were moving, but she couldn’t hear a word. Someone grunted loudly, almost in Misery’s ear, a noise of intense satisfaction. She jerked her hands free of Ian’s and felt them rip. Her heart lurched. “No! You can’t have them!”

Her scream blended with the noise. Ian grabbed for her again, and Geoffrey lunged forward from the doorway. For a second they were all in contact.

The walls snapped back into solidity, and the noise cut off. Misery felt rather than heard a snarl of frustration.

“Are you all right?” Geoffrey stepped back, letting his arms fall to his sides. One of his white collar tips was brown and curling, as if singed.

Misery thought to reach out to him, but then she saw Ian’s hands. Blood dripped steadily onto the study carpet from half a dozen thin deep cuts that ran crosswise across all his fingers.

She’d done that. Somehow. She knelt down to her workbasket for a clean length of muslin, blinking away tears. 

“It’s nothing.” But Ian let her bind his wounds, before reaching carefully with a bandaged hand to stroke her hair.

Misery ducked out from under his arm. “The doctor mentioned a place,” she said, not quite looking at either of them. “I think I should go there.”

She couldn’t save herself. But she could save them.

After a moment, Ian nodded. “I’ll arrange it.”

***

_18th November, 1871_

Ian meant to take Misery to the rest home himself. He’d arranged for Thomas and his nurse to go with her and stay in one of the small staff cottages, possibly even stay in another cottage himself (“I could conceal you under my cloak and smuggle you out from the home for the night,” he’d said to Misery, and he’d caught a glimpse of her old daring self in her answering smile). But the morning’s post brought an urgent summons for both himself and Geoffrey to the House of Lords, to vote on the much-contested Third Reform Act that would extend the franchise to many of the local farmers and countrymen, a vote that was by no means certain.

(“Go,” Misery had said, when he’d visibly dithered by the coach, unsure whether to postpone her departure until he could accompany her himself. The nurse, already inside, lifted Thomas up to the window, where he offered his father a solemn stare and a sticky-handed wave. “Come when you can.” She was still painfully thin, but she seemed resolute, as if the decision to go had confirmed something in her. Ian kissed her, feeling her soften against him, the taste of her as intoxicating as ever, and dragged his mouth away with difficulty.)

He should have known. A day later the butler at his London house brought a letter in Mrs. Ramage’s near-illiterate pencilled scrawl. The coach hadn’t returned. A stable boy, dispatched by horseback for the twenty-mile ride to the rest home, returned with the news that her Ladyship hadn’t arrived, neither. The frantic search that ensued found the coach in a ditch and the coachman, neck broken, still inside; no trace of anyone else. Two days later Nurse Wilkes walked up the manor drive with scratch marks on her face and a lump the size of a goose egg on the side of her head, saying Misery had run mad, screaming at the coachman and grabbing the reins, and she herself had only regained consciousness sometime after the crash, Misery and Thomas both gone. Dazed, she’d wandered for some time before coming to her senses. The search had extended through the moors and, in desperation, to anywhere a madwoman and her child might have been taken in.

“You think she was lying.” Ian paced the length of the study again.

Geoffrey nodded. “We only have the nurse’s word that Misery caused the crash. And that she saw nothing of them afterwards.”

“Why? Why would she lie?”

“I don’t know.” Geoffrey put a handful of dried greenery down on the desk. “But I found this in her room.”

Ian stared at it. “I’m no botanist.”

Geoffrey sorted through the coarse-toothed leaves and picked out a wilted white flower. It looked a little like a lily.

“Neither am I. So I asked the head gardener. Thorn apple, he said. A foreign weed that likes hot summers.”

“And?”

Geoffrey’s steady gaze met his. “It’s a poison. Causes hallucinations.”

The image of Misery sipping tea arose before Ian suddenly, as clear as day. He stretched out his hand, ignoring the sting of his cuts, retrieved the flower and - cautiously - sniffed it. It had a familiar metallic tang.

Not mad. Drugged.

Nurse Wilkes had asked to be dismissed from service, stating that she felt unable to carry on working even when ( _if_ ) Thomas returned. It had seemed a reasonable request at the time. She’d left immediately. 

“I asked around the village.” Geoffrey spread the big map across the mahogany desk, weighing it down with a book when it tried to roll back up again. “Eventually I found someone who knew where she lived.” He put a finger down on the map.

Ian knew the area. Barely a mile across country from where the coach had been found.

“But why?” It still didn’t make sense.

Geoffrey shrugged, and his mouth twisted in a humourless grin. “Let’s ask her.” he answered.

The cuts - still inexplicable - throbbed again on Ian’s hands.

***

_18th November, 1871_

Misery banged her tied hands on the cellar door. The wood jarred in its frame, but the lock held firm. “Let me out!”

Thomas squealed from somewhere on the other side. He sounded more excited than afraid, as if this were some new hiding game, where his mama disappeared and waited for him to find her. Misery wiped her eyes with the back of her hand - alive, he was still alive - and squinted desperately through the darkness for anything useful.

“Soon, your Ladyship,” Nurse Wilkes called back, a weird glee in her voice. “It won’t be long now.”

Her accent was different, the warm roundness of her Cornish vowels now nasal and strained. It had first changed the day before, as they drove along the sea coast road.

They’d stopped for a moment for Nurse Wilkes to excuse herself, and when she’d come back she’d fussed for a moment with the wicker travelling basket. Eventually she’d put a flask of tea down next to Misery, before settling back and taking a sleepy Thomas back into her lap.

“Drink it,” she’d said, in that odd new voice. “It will make it easier.”

Her eyes, flat and grey, gazed directly at Misery, who’d felt her skin prickle in warning.

_Hadn’t her eyes been brown before?_

“What on earth do you mean?” She picked up the flask. A white flower drifted limply on the surface of the liquid.The grey eyes bored into her.

Misery lowered the cup. “I’m not thirsty.”

The skin on the nurse's neck bubbled, lifting up slowly in chains of small yellow blisters. “It won’t hurt you.” One of her hands picked itself up - there was no other way to describe it, Misery thought dazedly; it was if the woman were a puppet and someone had pulled a particular string - and fastened itself over Thomas’ face, pinching his nose shut and covering his mouth. Thomas twitched, letting out a muffled grunt.

“Poor thing,” the nurse said in that strange voice. “It would be a kindness.”

Misery had started from her seat, but now she froze. She could hear the coachman whistling tunelessly outside.

“Drink it, you cockadoodie brat.” 

Thomas was squirming now, his face turning purple. The nurse’s grip was inexorable.

Misery’s throat seemed to have closed in terror, and she almost choked on the first mouthful of tea, but she got it down, wincing at the bitterness. Nurse Wilkes let go. Thomas took a great gulp of air and let it out in a healthy bawl. Red fingermarks stood out on his face. 

The noise was back, a dull distant hum.

“I can’t get all the way through,” Nurse Wilkes said. She lifted Thomas, bouncing him a little. The coach walls were pulsing in and out, each squeeze a fraction deeper. “He put me in the book, but that’s not enough.” Her mouth moved a fraction behind the words.

Through the throbbing coach walls, Misery could see hay bales, stacked against a wooden wall, and dust particles dancing lazily in sunlight. The carcass of a cow lay diagonally across the barn doorway. The reek of decomposition mixed with the smell of burning. 

“It has to be you,” Nurse Wilkes said to Misery. Sickeningly, she sounded apologetic. “You’re the one he couldn’t kill.”

Misery had lost time then, in a blurring flicker that jumped between the barn with the dead cow, where the dust now hung in the air unmoving, and her own world, where it was as someone had put their thumb on the edge of the book of her life and forced the pages out in a reckless headlong spray. First the coach and the coachman ducking his head to look in - the nurse striking, a sickening crack of bone - a flick, and Misery was out of the coach, the panicked horses drumming their hooves as they dragged the coach away; another, and heather bent beneath her feet as she stumbled across the moor, her arm in a vice-like grip; another, and the nurse shoved her into a chair, and leaned forward to pry up one of Misery’s eyelids, her breath in Misery’s face stinking of wet smoke —“Too much. You’ll have to sleep it off.” And then a dark yawing nothingness, where something was constantly pulling and clawing at her, and all Misery could do was hang on.

When she’d finally woken she’d been in the cellar, with her feet and hands tied. 

“Almost ready,” the nurse sang out. Footsteps stopped at the other side of the door. “Just a minute.” Keys rattled. “You need to promise to be good.”

Misery stared at the door. “And if I don’t?”

A giggle. “Oh, I think you know.” Her voice shifted, sliding back to its original accent. “Aren’t you a big boy, Thomas? So strong.”

Thomas gave one of his excited clucks at his name. Misery’s hands tightened into fists. 

“Not strong enough, though,” Nurse Wilkes said, the words sick with false sentiment. “Not nearly strong enough.”

“I’ll do what you want.” What else could she say?

“That’s a good girl. Gold star.” The door clicked open. Misery flinched at the glare of daylight. “I want you to do this of your own free will,” the nurse added, apparently unaware of any contradiction, and reached for Misery’s hands.

Thomas was sitting on the kitchen floor, fenced into the far corner by two chairs that lay on their sides. He was thoughtfully mouthing the leg of a wooden horse, but when he saw Misery emerge he pulled it away long enough to give her a sweet gummy smile.

There was a little slack in the ropes around her ankles, enough to take half a step if not more, but no give at all at her wrists. When she stumbled, Nurse Wilkes picked her up, throwing her over one shoulder with unnerving ease. This close, there was something terribly wrong with the woman. She was too solid, somehow, and distorted everything around her.

“Where are you taking me?” Misery twisted around, trying to see Thomas again, but Nurse Wilkes strode quickly out through the cottage door. 

“Where Do Bees go,” she said. It meant nothing to Misery.

She was jolted up and down with each step, fighting to keep Thomas in view. He turned his head to keep them in sight and her last glimpse was of Thomas putting one chubby hand up on a chair leg, attempting to haul himself up, his lower lip turning down in a prelude to noisy upset. 

A worn cart-track ran a short distance to the barn. Steel-grey clouds pressed low in the sky, and the heath around them stretched away for what looked like miles with no other buildings - or people - visible. 

Then Misery caught a flash of white disappearing behind a distant clump of gorse as Nurse Wilkes swung her down from her shoulder. She had no chance to look again before the nurse shoved her inside.

It could have been a bird. Or a lost sheep. But she didn’t think so.

 _Forever_ , she thought, but all she could think of was that hand closing over her son’s face.

***

_18th November, 1871_

Geoffrey yanked Ian down beside him in the cover of the gorse, ignoring the thorns stabbing through his trousers. They’d left the horses tethered beside the sea coast road. They’d both walked and ridden these landscapes since childhood, earned a bone-deep familiarity with the known dangers of hidden bogs and unexpected mists; now, though, it was as if they stood once again on the Barbary Coast, preparing for a confrontation with the unknowable. Geoffrey felt for his service revolver, making sure it was still secure in his coat pocket.

A baby’s grizzling cry rose from the cottage ahead, which lay almost concealed by a shallow dip in the land.

Ian nudged him. “You get Thomas,” he said in a low voice. “Take him away from here. Back to Mrs. Ramage, if you can.”

“I’m not leaving you. Or Misery,” Geoffrey hissed back, appalled. “I’ll go into the barn first and distract that woman.” He wanted Thomas safe, but a crying child was hard to hide. “You stay between the barn and the cottage.” He had no doubt that Ian would defend the boy to the last of his strength if necessary. He pushed himself up onto one knee, making sure to stay within cover.

Ian studied him. “The boy needs his father,” he said abruptly.

Geoffrey felt as if the wind had been knocked out of him. They’d never spoken of it before. He’d tried to ask Misery, when they’d returned from Africa to find Thomas’ baby blue eyes darkening to a hazel shade all too familiar to Geoffrey from his own shaving mirror. She’d smiled at him with that warm intimate smile, still dazzling. (“He loves you too, you know,” she’d said, a statement he found himself unable to answer). 

Ian was still looking at him. Geoffrey noted that while Ian’s gaze was steady, the fingers of one hand were flexing in and out against the scrub, a small but definite movement. It occurred to him that it wasn’t just Thomas Ian was trying to protect.

“He needs all of us.” Geoffrey dared to dip his head and touch his lips once, lightly, to Ian’s forehead. Ian’s eyes widened, but he didn’t retreat.

The barn suddenly lurched a few inches sideways, and just as suddenly jumped back again. When it came back it was taller, painted wood rather than local stone, and odd black wires ran along the roof edge before jutting out into nothingness. At the same time, a loud noise ripped through the air, biting and tearing at it, shaking the very rocks beneath them.

Geoffrey hauled Ian to his feet by one hand. As one, they sprinted for the barn.

***

_18th November, 1871/3rd September, 1984_

“Shtand shtill.” Nurse Wilkes hefted the strange roaring machine with its vibrating blade with one hand and squinted at Misery. The whole left side of the nurse’s face was misshapen and covered in blood, and her mouth barely moved as whatever was controlling her forced the words through. In between sentences she spat out bloody wads of paper with hacking coughs. The skin of her neck and torso peeled off in blackened sheets.

Misery backed away. Her legs hit the dead cow, and she staggered.

“Shtop.” Nurse Wilkes swung the machine down, slicing through one of the cow’s rear legs just below the hip. The machine snarled briefly as it ground through bone, and then the whole hindquarter slumped to one side, severed, stagnant blood soaking the straw. Misery froze.

“I always liked you best.” The blade pivoted back up towards Misery’s face, spattering her with a fine red spray. “But now I’m dying, and he burned you up anyway. You should want to help me.” She sounded more hurt than angry. “You should,” she said, and brought down the blade.

It cut through the air only a fraction of an inch away from her ear, so close that she saw half a dozen hairs detach in its wake and fall in slow spirals towards the floor. Nurse Wilkes turned the blade to follow the curve of Misery’s shoulder, and again to trace down her arm.

The blade left an absence in the air behind it, a translucent edge that wavered unsteadily in the air. Something was behind it, something Misery couldn’t yet see.

The barn door jolted on its hinges as someone hit it from the outside, the bolt rattling. Misery jumped. The blade took a chunk off her right hip, slicing dress and petticoat as neatly as it had amputated the cow. The pain was searing.

“Oops.” Nurse Wilkes giggled. “I told you to shtay shtill. Now you’re bleeding.”

Blood ran in freshets down her leg, now shaking. Misery fixed her gaze on the door. She could hear an occasional bang from outside, but there were other, stealthier sounds above, as if someone were climbing onto the barn’s roof. Looking for a way in. 

“Misery!” Ian’s voice, outside the door. “Can you hear me?”

Nurse Wilkes had cut along the edges of Misery’s feet, slicing the ropes in the process, and was now moving back up the other side. She pushed herself up to one knee with a grunt. “Don’t anshwer.” She cocked her head to one side, eyes bright with malice. “What’sh that?”

Misery glared down at her, pursed her lips and whistled loudly and clearly, the three-tone signal Ian had given her when they’d been sneaking out of the Rat King’s secret tunnels under the Ville de la Souffrance. 

“That’sh enough, misshy.” Pain seared through her left calf as the nurse dug the saw into her skin, letting it gnaw out a chunk. Misery bit her lip, forcing herself not to move. The nurse was looking at her now, not the roof; she had to give the others time. 

After an endless agonising moment the blade moved away.

“I saved you. Maybe I could have done it again if I’d had accessh to proper medications rather than those cockadoodie herbs.” The nurse spat out another bloody hunk of paper. “But you’re not even grateful.” 

The translucent band rippled around Misery, opening on to the unknown. She was being cut free of everything she knew to leave a hole for the nurse to step into. Not an exchange. An invasion.

Nurse Wilkes shifted the weight of the machine from one arm to the other, blinking blood from her eyes. “You’re all brats,” she said, and lifted the blade for the final cut.

Geoffrey dropped from the rafters, his feet hitting the machine squarely on one garish orange side and knocking it clear of Nurse Wilkes’ hands. The woman let out a howl of rage and lunged after it, and Ian, braced overhead on a crossbeam, put a bullet into her shoulder that knocked her to the ground. Geoffrey advanced towards her with his own revolver drawn.

Ian lowered himself, landing with a thud, and swivelled immediately towards Misery.

“My darling. You’re hurt.” He reached out to her.

His hands slipped through the wavering edge, unable to make contact. Alarm filled his eyes. “Misery!”

The gap around her widened. Misery tried to move towards her husband, and instead spun on her own axis like a globe, facing into the abyss. 

Worlds stretched out beneath her, like jewels scattered across black velvet: a man with a gun set out across an endless desert, a girl drenched in blood walked through a town on fire, a paper boat rode a torrent of water down a gutter to a waiting darkness, a metal cart rattled up a rickety switchback railway, a horseless vehicle accelerated towards a crowd of people, a one-armed man smudged paint onto a canvas, all of them humming with purpose… As Misery turned she made out lines connecting some of them, from fine golden chains to thickly woven braided cables. Far below (or above? She had lost all sense of direction as she spun) all the threads joined together, knotting and building one on the other to form a vast craggy tower. She blinked, and the tower was a man, tall and square-jawed, his gaze intent behind small rimless glasses.

As she rotated, she felt something give above her head, dropping her further towards the abyss that yawned between the worlds. She glanced around frantically. Up above her Geoffrey had joined Ian, the two of them grabbing futilely at the air, their mouths moving soundlessly. The sight of them, so dear and yet so far, stabbed through her. She had to get back.

Just out of reach, a green vine studded with white trumpet-like flowers, snaked up from one of the worlds and back into Misery’s own. Where it entered a bulge had formed, a painful alien swelling like an oak gall. She could see the vine pulsing, and she knew that it was doing so in tune with the bone-shaking vibration of the saw.

It was too far. Misery reached out anyway, and succeeded only in spinning herself around again, catching a dizzying glimpse of the barn, Ian, Geoffrey - 

And Nurse Wilkes, the shambolic bulk of her rising like Frankenstein’s monster behind them both, one of her arms groping across the barn floor towards the machine. Neither of the men seemed aware of her. The vine shuddered and sent out a few more greedy tendrils.

Misery would only have one chance. She kicked out, twisting, feeling the wound on her hip break open with a gush of warm blood. As she spun round for the last time, she threw her head back to snap whatever held her.

Her eyes met Ian’s, then Geoffrey’s. 

“I love you,” she said into the void, knowing they couldn’t hear her, and then she was falling. Misery hit the vine across her chest with her arms outstretched, grabbing on tightly and praying it would hold. The shock as it tightened nearly threw her, but the vine had clung to her as soon as she made contact - it was hot to the touch, fleshy, and the buzz made her teeth chatter - and it was enough. 

Far below she could see the barn again, this one containing a faint outline - a sketch, almost - of Nurse Wilkes’ body, lying beside another dead cow. The woman must almost be through into Misery’s own world. She had very little time. She shifted her weight to one arm and dug the nails of her other hand into the oak gall.

It bucked under her hand, fighting her, and a caustic brown liquid seeped from it, burning her fingers. Misery hung on. She’d almost dug her way out of a grave with her hands; she could dig a new one for the nurse. The vine whipped left, then right, trying to shake her off now, lashing her face with sharp-toothed leaves. From the corner of her vision she saw Ian throw himself between Geoffrey and the nurse’s descending blade. Misery set her teeth and pulled with everything she had, not caring what happened to her as long as the others were safe. 

_(forever)_

It gave. The vine went slack. The leaves that had beaten at her were suddenly brown and brittle, and then dust. Disbelieving, Misery looked up. 

Nurse Wilkes halted. All of a sudden she looked as brittle as the leaves, and then she collapsed inward, puffing into nothingness. Misery glanced down to see the nurse’s body snap back into existence in the world where the vine originated. It lay there unmoving, finally empty in death.

The vine sagged. Misery looked up one last time at the men she loved, her vision blurring with tears. Safe, yes, but leaving them cut her deeper than anything Nurse Wilkes could have done with her saw.

A single blood-red thread, finer than a hair, spun itself out of the blood at Misery’s hip and arched across where Nurse Wilkes had cut her out of her world. It looked too fragile to make the journey, certainly too fragile to support anything more than a feather’s weight. It wavered as it neared its destination, and then she lost sight of it entirely. The vine crumbled in her hands. She braced for the fall.

Instead, something tugged gently at her, a friendly nudge, and pulled her slowly and steadily upwards. The red thread that carried her was now braided together with two threads of gold.

She could feel Ian’s fire and Geoffrey’s quiet determination, echoing down the connection. As she reached the hole and was drawn through it the edges sealed themselves back up, seamless, and the threads faded from sight. The last thing she saw before her world was entirely hers again was the tower. Waiting. Watching.

She was back in the stone barn, hay and dirt under her bare feet rather than the endless void. Her hip and calf were on fire with pain and she stank of blood, and none of that stopped her from flinging her arms around the two men and holding onto them as tight as she possibly could. They did the same.

“Dearest,” Ian said, his face in her hair. Geoffrey kissed Misery on the cheek, an extravagant smack that startled her as much as it delighted her, and then capped it off by doing the same to Ian, who snorted with laughter. 

“Thomas.” Misery let go. “Is he all right?”

Ian and Geoffrey scooped her up between them queen's chair-fashion to carry her to the cottage kitchen. Thomas was lying asleep behind the chairs, tear tracks drying on his face. They set her down, and Misery lifted him onto her lap, gratitude welling up within her.

He opened drowsy eyes. “Mama!” 

It was the first time he’d said it. Misery hugged him to her, feeling his warm body melt against hers in perfect security. 

“Yes.” She looked over his head at the other two. “I’m back.”

THE END


End file.
